Damage Assessment of Bitumen Refineries Using Simapro (LCA) Inventory Data

Abstract

Oil refineries are complex facilities. Several processes, such as distillation, vacuum distillation, or steam reforming are required to produce a large variety of oil products such as gasoline, light fuel oil or bitumen. The environmental impacts of oil refineries are assessed using the technique of life cycle assessment (LCA). In this paper, only the material production phase of the bitumen life cycle is considered. To improve the quality of the LCA, a regionalized life cycle inventory (LCI) database for the Oil refineries and commercial LCI databases are used to validate and model unit processes with LCA software.